i [love] marketing.

Can you predict the outcome of the World Cup games based on the hotel the teams stay in?

TripAdvisor thinks so. In a bit of genius marketing, TripAdvisor tapped into its own powerful community to predict who’s going to win the World Cup. By analyzing reviews of the accommodations for each team, Trip advisor assesses how ready & rested the players will be for their big games. Called the Hotel Cup, it’s a super-fun spin on the wisdom of the crowds. And who knows, maybe there’s something in it. Sports gamblers, take note.

Instagram is a wonderful place to shop

Clothes and cityscapes. Clothes and food. Clothes and sunsets. That's what I mostly like on Instagram. So fashion brands being there is mostly a gigantic bonus for me. It turns out, I am definitely not the only one, as Instagram is quickly becoming one of the top online shopping destinations. While e-commerce is still not part of the app, the browsing - a.k.a. the virtual window shopping is. Instagram strengths are in the really careful curation of displayed items (the bar for artsy/beautiful/lifestyle photos on Instagram is pretty high) that are interspersed with the photos of friends (and food. and sunsets). More than impersonal Facebook or Twitter update blasts, meant for mass audience, Instagram photos exude a sense of craftsmanship and personality (while also being meant for wide audience). 

A free advice for fashion brands: post a link to displayed products for each of your photos. Drive users to product page. Every opportunity is conversion opportunity. You'd not believe how much traffic you'll get.

Image above is a pic of Prada magazine ad, from my Instagram account.

 

 

Let me tell you a Good STORY

Story is a concept store on Manhattan that updates its theme and products ever week. To add a do-good twist to the store, its founder, Rachel Shechtman, partnered with notorious social entrepreneurs, like TOMS and FEED Project, to create a brand new Good STORY. The Good STORY will run until June 1, and every item for purchase has a direct positive social impact. My takeaway: more brands, traditionally sustainable or not, should embrace the STORY idea. It’s all about the concept stores these days, anyway. Might as well do some good with it.

First Kiss and the birth of invisible advertising

The “First Kiss” video gets me every time. It doesn’t matter that, in addition to being the first kiss among two strangers, it is also a very very clever ad for a clothing company Wren. The video has gotten a considerable traction on YouTube (79 million views and counting).

Despite some negative reactions ("this is advertising!!"), I really love both the idea and its execution. In the age when invisible technology is all the rage, why should invisible advertising be looked down upon?

 

Scough is the answer to your prayers, Newyorkers

For everyone who lives in New York and rides the subway, this is a godsent idea. But first: how many times you turned your head in disgust trying to remain civil and at the same time cursing the person next to you on a crowded car who didn't cover their mouth when coughing? Well, yes.

Enter the Sough. It's a nice-looking scarf (forget those surgical masks) with a hidden filter that purifies the air we are breathing, on the subway and off. It fends the germs away, and when placed directly over the mouth, allows its wearer to breathe in the bacteria-free air (or nearly.) 

Get yours here! 

For those who are tuning in tonight...

According to Nielsen, the average age of Oscar's viewer is 51. That's kinda AARP audience, so it's not surprising that it doesn't attract the flurry of brand activity that, say, Super Bowl or Grammy's do. Still, for those who are watching, Twitter is the primary companion of this evening's festivities. Knowing that, Twitter partnered with Poptip, a social surveys company and E! Online, to create a card tracking the popularity of Oscar nominees. 

Those who follow E! Online on Twitter can vote in real time for the nominees, and Poptip notes the results. Expect a lot of good data coming out of it, even if your favorites aren't chosen. 

Labor of love gets rewarded by your love: send a message to the person who made your food

Oh god. This is probably the last thing that already overstimulated Brooklyn moms need right now: an ability to message the farmers that harvested the ingredients of their carefully selected, uber-local, beyond organic meals. Yet, that's what they have, thanks to Cisse Trading Co. The company prints QR codes on its chocolate deserts and cocoa drinks that allow customers to post a note to farmers whose labor created the ingredients. Once users scan the QR code, they are taken to the company's Facebook page where they can leave a note for the wonderful farmers that provided for us.

While this is, personally, a bit of an overkill for me, I can totally see giants like Kraft jumping on this trend. After all, brands are all about sustainability and transparency these days, might as well work really good for them. Food companies should add this to their branding playbook.

World's First Instagram Cooking Show

I can see how food brands can jump on Instagram video recipes. In 16s or less, they can demo their products, show how to mix ingredients together and lead you through the steps towards a tasty meal. 

This is not yet a trend, through. For now, only an enthusiastic Dutch cook has taken to the platform to host his "Bart Fish Tales" Instagram video series. So far, the series is only moderately popular, but it being an incredibly easy way for brands to do something useful both for their audience and for their brand awareness, we've probably see more of this content format pretty soon.  

Every neighborhood should have its Street Store

This is such a wonderfully human idea, cooked up by two advertising people, and enabled by their agency, M&C Saatchi in Cape Town. It's a pop-up store in the affluent neighborhood of Cape Town, called Greenpoint, and it's a pop-up store for the homeless. The human psychology insight here is that people are willing to donate more clothes and more often, if they don't have to go through the hoops of dropping the bags off, scheduling the pickup times, and the like. Best is just to let them drop it in front of their own door. Which is roughly what the "Street Store" does. Clothes are neatly displayed, making them easy to browse through, so homeless persons can pick and choose the items they like. All the print materials, that both housed the clothes and announced the shop, were made re-printable, so anyone who wants to replicate the idea under the same brand can do it. Great idea.

World's Top 50 Planners to Watch

50 planners to watch in 2014 - The Planning Salon from Julian Cole

Julian Cole did it again. He put together his annual top industry talent list, and it's global, diverse and impressive. (Personally, I am happy it's alphabetical, otherwise I'd be a teeny tiny tumbnail). Great job, Jules!

Be brand disloyal, get rewarded (but just this one time)

Here's what one does if they really, really dislike Starbucks. Two baristas created DC Disloyalty Card. The benefits, according to the founders, are too many to count. First, by acquiring a disloyalty card, consumers firmly put themselves in the "let's support the local coffee shops" team. Then, they express their anti-corporate sentiment. Then, they probably also feel good about themselves because of the above two. And finally, they enjoy some damn good local coffee.

So how does the disloyalty card work? Apparently, one needs to buy a coffee from the six participating local shops, and their seventh cup will be free. Get it? By being disloyal to one single coffee shop, consumers get rewarded to a free drink. They also get to know their local coffee joints, taste different kinds of coffee, and try something new. Disloyalty = diversity.

How would you look if you weren't photoshopped? Aerie finds out.

This is something more of lingerie brands should do if they had the balls (um...). Featuring real-life, non-skinny women so far has helped only Dove to become an iconic brand with its "Real Beauty" campaign, but lingerie industry seems slow to respond. 

Well, until now. Aerie (an American Eagle company) launched "Aerie Real" campaign showing non-Photoshopped models. They look amazing. The effort is even more meaningful knowing Aerie's audience: adolescent girls between 15 - 21 who are still figuring out their body image. There's also #aeriereal social component to the campaign, where girls submit their own photos.

I'd really love to see sales this campaign generated. Hope it was more than the usual one would, giving this brand a financial incentive to keep doing great stuff like this.

The next level of contextual advertising: Mood-based ad serving

Very rarely any of us likes to see an ad on our mobile phone. But what if the mood is right? That's exactly what Apple is experimenting with. The next-gen ad serving will look at things like time of the day, location, current activity, mood, heart rate, blood pressure, adrenaline level, body temperature and other parameters and determine our emotional state. For this, of course, we need  a wearable tech device, but Apple's already working on that too.

Advertisers should be thrilled, but then again, knowing Apple, it's probably going to be a pricey, closed system.

Fashion Touchdown: A misstep in branding or a great idea?

For anyone who lives in the U.S.and works in advertising, there is no bigger annual event than Super Bowl (Personally, I have little idea what's going on in American football and advertising bores me). But, it's the time when brands go crazy, on the TV-screen and off-. And when I say that brands go crazy, I mean all brands. Even those that - for all intents and purposes - have nothing to do with either football, men or beer. But, brands are all about in-the-moment relevance, it comes as no surprise that Bloomingdale's wanted to jump the Super Bowl wagon. The retailer created a fashion/football auction where the lucky bidder can win one of the helmets exclusively designed by one of the 48 designers ranging from unknown rookies to Cynthia Rowley. All proceeds are going to NFL Foundation. Is the idea of fashion touchdown a branding faux-pass or a great opportunity? I'd need to see how many people actually bid on, in all truth, very neatly designed helmets to know the answer. 

Brand loyalty test

I can't decide if this is a successful brand stunt or a completely unnecessary monkeying with a brand's Facebook page. 

Burger King Norway opted in for a ballsy move to find out. In order to see which ones among their FB fans really, trully love Burger King, BK gave them a loyalty test. Or, rather, they offered them a Big Mac via BK's FB page. Those who decided to go for it, got a goodbye letter and a voucher for a Big Mac.

30K fans decided they'd rather have a one-time Big Mac than the lifetime of BK FB updates.

8K of those who stayed are, however, ready to die for BK. 

(and McDonald's marked an unexplained surge in traffic during the stunt)

Good brand utility grows from the brand mission

The thing I like even more is a simple direct line between the utility and the brand mission. (Yes, no more silly gadgets!) Coke's mission is to deliver happines. Christmas is the time of happiness, often wrapped up in a festive holiday paper. To deliver happines, one actually needs a wrapping paper. So Coke put it everywhere it possibly could, in the format of outdoor posters. A pretty good brand awareness/utility combo idea.

This campaign comes from Belgium, and is done by Duval Guillaume.

Operation Santa: Success

One additional thing from the successful holiday promotions department: my favorite online retailer, Zady.com, partnered with Vespa to deliver the very last minute gifts on Tuesday and Wednesday. This super-important operation was enabled by messengers dressed-up as Santas, and it delivered gifts all the way to the Christmas evening.

A very smart idea that combines superior customer service with the push for promotion and awareness (the effort was promoted on Zady.com, and their Instagram, Twitter and Facebook feeds). This initiative joins Zady's La Guardia holiday pop-up store, and is another example of an online-first retailer gone offline.

#BurberryGifts

 

 

Angela Ahrendts on its helm or not, Burberry is great at digital. The latest is Burberry Gifts initiative, spread wide and far across social media by both Burberry and its fans. 

 

The promotional campaign started on December 2nd, when Burberry Twitter fans in London were invited to enter to win a Burberry gift from the London Exclusives collection. This call to action ended on December 13th, and that's where the real fun started. 

 

The real fun started in the form of the Festive Van that's still roaming the streets of London. The lucky-to-be-winners are copiously following its traces, all along posting the sightings of the van on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. Burberry is keeping fans abreast of van's whereabouts via its social media channels, too, in combination with brand content, and the number of replies and RTs is insane. 

 

The van looks truly festive, and it's great that the campaign features such a great element of surprise, in combination with content strategy and social media. That's the holiday spirit (and some very smart promo strategy).

The next level of content and commerce integation

Is there a better shopping context for Leica camera than Instagram? Leica clearly thinks the answer is no. Instagram is place of budding photographers, photo enthusiasts, and just those in love with a good photo (among others). All of them can now purchase this camera right there on Instagram, without ever leaving their newsstream. 

Actually, it's not as simple as that, but smart people will probably find a way to make it better. As of now, purchasing is enabled by Arco (a tech startup) in combination with following Leica Brazil's Instagram account. After this, all it takes to become a proud owner of the LeicaC is to comment "purchase" on one of the account's photos. 

Fashion brands, jump on it!

Katz Deli Pop-Up

Pop-up stores - digital or physical - are all the rage. After all, who doesn't like a little surprise, exclusivity and curation? Katz Deli, another thing that's all the rage, partnered with The Hundreds to celebrate its 125 anniversary via future memorabilia: t-shirts, beanies, an apron and a turtleneck, all Katz Deli branded and designed by streetwear legends. The pop-up (at Katz Deli) will be live  December 17 - January 5th 2014.

Coke, meet Banksy.

Michael Kors loves Instagram

Michael Kors loves Instagram so much that it became the first brand to advertise there. And Instagram loves it back. Barely a day and a half after debuting its sponsored pic (above), Kors' Instagram account acquire about 34K new followers. After crunching some numbers, this means that a single sponsored post gained 16x more followers than a regular one.

This should be such a shocker, regarding the fact that sponsored posts are seen by people who do not already follow @michaelkors on Instagram so gaining followers is easier than exposing the already existing fan base to brand content, but there you have it.

The budding love affair between this fashion brand and the photo sharing platform didn't stop there, it should be noted. It continued in the elegant halls of the Tokyo National Museum, where Mr. Kors' promotional campaign for the Selma bag reached its glamourous ending on November 13.

But let's start from the beginning. The Instagram campaign went like this: to promote the label's Selma bag, MK created #JetSetSelma hashtag and users were encouraged to take pics of their Selma in the context of their lives - you know, their ordinary, globe-trotting, Madison-avenue strolling, art galleries'-visiting life. Once uploaded to Instagram, images are added to the Destination Kors gallery on Michael Kors website. (Not that all of this effort was for nothing. Kors has been giving away one bag per week since September to the most diligent photographer.)

So, in Tokyo National Museum, these photos were projected in the kaleidoscopic format, mixing locations, lifestyles, and different ways to wear a bag. Not to be forgotten, images were also printed and displayed on the museum walls. 

Ah, l'amour.

Twitter, next digital commerce platform?

There's a new partnership in town. Twitter and Starbucks joined their forces to enable users to gift each other Starbucks coffee via tweets. Bestowing a $5 latte on someone has never been easier. One just needs to include @tweetacoffee and the recipient's Twitter handle in their tweet, and the above mentioned latte is on its way either through adding the gift amount to the Starbucks card or printing the eGift.

Twitter has already proven in its partnership with Amex that it can be a quite robust digital commerce platform. Starbucks partnership takes this premise further. It is not hard to imagine how Twitter can evolve from current deals & discounts to gifting and to actual monetary exchanges. The critical advantage that Twitter has as a platform is a load of existing social relationships and content, both of which are highly coveted context for online transactions. 

The mechanism seems simple enough, and it will only get simpler. Neither technology nor user behaviors are a barrier here; it's the retailers that are slow-moving.

Tokyo, Italy

 

Italy is famous for many things, but high-speed Internet isn't one of them. To believe that fast Internet is possible in Italy, it may actually need imagining that you are somewhere else. And that's precisely what Fastweb, Italian telecom company has done. To show how their speedy broadband compares to that of Tokyo, it turned the entire Milan train stop into Tokyo's Shibuya. In this elaborate stunt, the station became equipped with everything from Japanese newspaper kiosks, teenagers and screens streaming Japanese programming. The shock of Italians stepping out of train into this faux-Shibuya is probably going to commensurate with their surprise of having the faster web.

Lady Gaga does engagement planning right

Lady Gaga has proven herself to be an excellent engagement planner. To promote her upcoming album, ARTPOP, the pop-icon turned to her most abundant resource: her fans.

Carefully cultivated over years, Lady Gaga's relationship with her fans is notorious. She affectionately calls them Little Monsters and often personally responds to their notes. This summer, the fans took the promotional matters into their own hands. 

This meant everything from crafting album flyers to a YouTube show called Radio ARTPOP, which revolved around discussing the upcoming album.

And that where her majesty herself comes in. Tapping into 1% of her audience (which measures 40 million Twitter fans and 60 million Facebook fans), Lady Gaga employed the "Accidental Influentials" approach based on "influencing easily influenced individuals who influence other easily influenced people."

Namely, she did what a smart engagement planner would recommend. She invited moderators of her Gaga Daily website "into the brand," i.e. to hang out with her closest entourage; she used UGC platform to spread the word, by leaking parts of her album on Radio ARTPOP and promoting the channel on Twitter; and she promised the first sneak-peek to a selected few of her final selection of songs to be included in the ARTPOP album.

All of this comes from the first truth of engagement planning: know thy audience. She nailed it.

KITTENS!!

I Can Haz UberKITTENS is a pretty amazing idea on so many levels. To celebrate National Cat Day (and to drive awareness and downloads of its app, cough cough), Uber partnered with Cheezburger site to deliver kittens to your doorstep. For 15 minutes, the kittens are yours to cuddle and play with. Then off the Uber driver goes to the next destination.

A pretty neat idea that benefits both the Uber, as it promotes its service, and forCheezburger network, an online content platform that entered the Internet Hall of Fame for its cat memes of unlimited variety.

The promo was priced at $20 and the money was donated to NYC, SF and Seattle's animal shelters. The kittens were also available for adoption, if you were feeling inspired.

Smart & business savvy PR stunt.

be smarter or, at least, more interesting in your online advertising

An ad made an unexpected turn on the Wired site. It announced Wired partnering with Absolut to sponsor #TransformToday, a contest where Wired readers are invited to submit their dream text project for a chance to work on it with the "WIRED Insider." Nothing new, surely, but what is Absolut doing there? Alcohol and innovation anyone? The unsurprising truth being is that for Absolut this is nothing more than advertising, per usual. Still, brands can take cue: there are a lot of worthwhile causes and a lot of ways to make people's lives better, and if a brand's spending money on advertising, might as well chip in on a meaningful initiative, like endearing vodka to emerging tech entrepreneurs.

This store shelf is stalking you.

The rumor has it that shelves can now track age and gender of passing customers. That is, in the global supermarket Mondelez they can, thanks to Microsoft Kinect. Sensors placed on the shelves stacked with groceries will track who’s looking at the goods, how old they are, and what’s their gender. The data is intended for marketing purposes, like tailoring specific messages to the target demographic or offering real-time utility as Hellmann’s mayo did in Brazil. Hellman’s used data to assemble recipes on the fly for the customers who put Hellmann’s mayo in their cart. The utility of data doesn’t have to stop there, though: it can potentially be a really good source of research on human decision-making and the influence of the context on the way we choose, making marketing both more efficient for the brands and more useful to consumers.

Further reading: Future of Retail by FactCo Labs

Follow the Penguin

Sunshine Aquarium in Tokyo is a lovely place. The problem is, not a lot of people know this. Distracted by their everyday lives, they all but forgotten about the aquarium.

This is where the Japanese ad & PR agency called Hakuhodo comes in. Hakuhodo's creative team took human distractibility as the starting point in coming up with their solution. The aquarium is only 1km (0.62miles) from the closes public transit station. To help people not get disinterested en route, they created the Penquin NAVI app: an augmented reality penguins that guide visitors right up to the aquarium's gates. This is where the second behavioral insight comes in: humans are enamored by cute animals and NAVI penguins move like the real things. Cuteness overload basically prevents people from looking anywhere else.

App downloads are encouraged at the public transport station, via QR codes. The results of this campaign are nothing short of impressive. Aquarium attendance increased 152% in a month the campaign was ran; and people who downloaded the app spent an average 9mins with it (which is way longer that it takes to walk 0.6 miles!).

Complex Magazine goes Sky High with Danny Brown, displays one of the best uses of parallax so far

For its recent interview with Danny Brown, Complex magazine broke out of the article mold and crated something truly fun. In its Sky High feature, Complex invites us to scroll down the memory lane of Danny’s life, from his childhood, fall and consequent rise, his love for Adderall, and finally to his famous on-stage fellatio. (As for that, Danny says “People get their d%^&s sucked every day, B. It shouldn’t be a big deal.”).

Guest interview

I gave an interview to a French blog called Les Francs Publicitaires couple of moths back. It was a fun conversation, and my favorite question was to describe my job to Samuel's 9-year old brother. You don't know what you are really doing until you have to explain it to a child. 

Rendez-vous with Ana Andjelic from Les Francs Publicitaires on Vimeo.

 

Strategy Playbook: Designing Responsive Strategy for Creative Agencies

 

Strategy in creative agencies often isn’t taken seriously - and deservedly so. We aren’t doing it right. In a world that’s connected, open and interactive, strategy needs to be the same. Strategy isn't an isolated discipline or a tucked-away department that makes a cameo in the agency process by drafting a brand architecture or summarizing a competitive opportunity. It's a problem-solving approach and a methodology that can help companies grow. It can turn agencies into growth hackers for brands by pointing the way for their business in the emerging digital markets. To get into this value matchmaking game, we first need to expand what strategy (and strategists) must do.

Economics of value-based pricing

"One prominent feature of information goods is that they have large fixed costs of production, and small variable costs of reproduction. Cost-based pricing makes little sense in this context; value-based pricing is much more appropriate. Different consumer may have radically different values for a particular information good, so techniques for differential pricing become very important."*

It's no wonder that traditional marketing and advertising don't work in digital space. Customers' perceptions of value of a product/service and their expectations of the value they'll gain are completely unrelated with the cost of creating that product/service. Companies' value proposition thus needs to be correlated closely with consumers' value perception. This value perception is shaped by Google-led commoditization of products/services, transparency of pricing, and social information - to a greater (much greater) extent than advertising. Key to success? Staying close to customer's perceptions and expectations of value. That's the path to sustainability; everything else has a short shelf life, literally and figuratively.

* From here.

State of Digital Business in 2012

State of Digital Business 2012 from Ana Andjelic

 In lieu of end-of-the-year recap traditions, I assembled a little overview of brands' digital efforts through the prism of business growth. I wanted to see how brands are using digital to grow their businesses, and what strategies and methods they adopt. As you can expect, most brands are still heavily market-focused. Brands that focus on human needs and behaviors as a starting point in their sustainable growth strategy are still exceptions rather than a rule. Enjoy.

 

The Fast Follower Advantage

"The Airbnbs of the world are business manuals for companies to learn from and apply to their businesses. Forget Six Sigmas and Five P's. In a volatile environment, it's more important to have the agility necessary for incremental growth, a laser user focus and ability to view business through a problem-solving perspective. As digital-first companies grow and move up the value chain, their definitions of quality and value become the norm. With no barriers of entry left, big companies have no choice but adopt them."

The rest of my Ad Age article is here. 

What Marketers are Getting Wrong About Loyalty

I wrote an article for Fast Company. Have a look. 

Here's the presentation I gave at a SVA class last week

SVA presentation from Ana Andjelic

SxSW is in the air

SxSW voting has started, and all of us have already encountered either one of these (or all of them). While I am not terribly optimistic about this upcoming fastival (Learn All About Hackatons! Don't Throw Your Brand Over the Cliff!), I managed to dig out a few panels from SxSW's video-enhanced-yet-still-confused Panel Picker that I'd like to see if I do go.

Should Brands Ditch Their Ad Agencies 

LEGO: Mastering the Art of Systemic Creativity

Sustainable Eating 

How to Design Tiny Services with Big Data

Prototyping UX in the Touch First World

Building Brands, Not Just Apps

The Future of Retail is in Your Appartment

Brand is Product is Service. Now What?

Install This: Making Great Digital Experiences

The End of Simple and the Future of User Experience

Can a Credit Card Create a Sense of Community?

The Future of Driving

Disrupt by Design: Innovating Inside Big Commerce 

Honesty: A Radical New Way to Work Together

Design Language for Tangible and Ambient Interfaces

At the end of the day, if I skip next year's SxSW, the only panel that I would really be missing out on is this. 

Digital Strategy Course on July 20th

I will be teaching again Digital Strategy Course on July 20th here in NYC. As always, the course will be super-practical, with participants coming out of it with a bunch of hopefully useful digital thinking and doing tools. Besides that, we'll cover coming up with KPIs and setting benchmarks of success. We'll also explore tools for collaboration between digital strategists and other disciplines in the organization. 

I am pretty excited as I planning to introduce my approach called Digital Thinking at this course. 

Do come!

tool-based knowledge specialization sucks, behavior-based specialization doesn't

At this past SxSW, I was part of the panel talking about Social Media Strategy. My thoughts are on the slides 25-33. Enjoy.

View more presentations from Ana Andjelic

stuff i'll be looking out for at sxsw

I got a minute to browse through the most unhelpful site of the web a.k.a. SxSW's Speaker Guide, but came out with a few things that caught my eye ... As anyone who ever went to SxSW knows, panels are a roll of dice. The awesome sounding panel can turn out to be a dud, and vice-versa. But, anyway, here's what I am looking forward to ...

Design and Mobile Start-Up   Applying Behavior Design   Lessons from Disruptors: Game-Changing Start-Ups    How to Harvest Consumer Intent from Social Web   The Secret Lives of Links   Time Bandits: The Next Revolution in Social   Interface Technology: Gesture Systems and Beyond   The Science of Habits: Why We Do What We Do   Ambient Location and the Future of the Interface   Maps of Time: Data as Narrative   Curators and the Curated   Fashion and the New Taste Graph

 

McLuhan is right (again)

The other day I came across this image (regretably, can't remember where), and it striked me as a lovely way to summarize the problem of fitting digital media into marketing thinking. Yes, we still have that problem. We are collecting Likes and views, measuring awareness, and resizing content - all instead of accepting that the rules of the game are through and through new and trying to understand them. 

What is Digital Strategy and Why Agencies Need It?

A couple of Fridays ago, I thought a Digital Strategy Workshop together with Farrah and Ale. It was an all-around awesome experience: participants were smart and wonderfully engaged, my co-teachers were super-inspiring and insightful, and finally, we put together a really fun (and informative) presentation - a section of which I am including here. That's the part I presented, to kick the workshop off. 

Speakers' notes are below:

Slide 3: Every conversation about the topic, area, or practice starts with its definition. Well, one of the great strengths of digital planning is that we haven’t settled on a single definition. As it goes, if you ask 10 people what digital planning is, you will get at least 11 different answers. And that’s a good thing, because if Richard Buchanan is to be trusted, we know that we are alive. After all, all the great, revolutionary shifts in culture, science or society didn't have names at first - think postmodernism (hell, i still don't know how to define it), innovation, DNA research, etc. We always have to rely on what's already out there to define a new field, and more often than not, what's out there is not enough.

Slide 4:  At the same time, there is clearly a need for digital planning thinking and tools, otherwise there wouldn't be there workshop. From your own experience, you know that you are dealing with things that you didn't have to deal with before. Above all, you are dealing with the need to think about how to create value for both customers and clients. This means you need to think how to create a relationship between them that doesn't benefits clients only. A related question is how to make new forms of relationship between buyers and sellers work for us. To clarify this point, the very idea of who buyers and sellers are is different. Sellers are not only brands anymore as collaborative consumption and redistribution markets can attest. Just think AirBnb, Etsy, Getaround, Neighborgoods, etc. Group buying and flash sales are also an example. Speaking of group sales, we are dealing with interconnected individuals that share, review, comment, and are able to make or brake brand's reputation by introducing unprecedented transparency of information.

Slide 5: Case in point: Community and technology, in combination, reshape marketplaces by changing dynamics between supply and demand, buyers and sellers, consumers and products. They have the capacity to create new markets by focusing on the previously unaddressed segments - all of the above being examples.

Slide 6: Venturing into unaddressed segments has proven to be rewarding. We are not dealing with someone’s side project, but with the emerging industries.

Slide 7: Why is all of this important? All of the new value models change consumers' expectations and shape their habits. They expect from brands the same thing they have been tought to expect from online services and tools - immediacy, convenience, transparency, competitive offering. Above all, they expect to be in charge themselves.

Slide 8: Our job as digital strategists in this context is the following: create a plan for arranging elements in such a way as best to accomplish a particular purpose. First, I stole this definition from Charles Eames, who was talking about design when he said the above. Design analogy is especially convenient here, because if we are to be successful, we are to shape and format the digital environment. Also, design is not about end product, but it is a systematic process of identifying problems, and then researching, creating, testing, and implementing solutions. This is the second thing that's important - a problem solving approach. We address our clients through this problem-solving prism - every assignment has to be reformulated as a particular problem that the brand is focusing on - either it is the sales problem, the audience problem, or the brand perception problem. Lastly, talking about arranging elements leads us to systems approach, a system that connects people and technology, products and content, brands and services. 

Slide 9: The best digital campaigns have been built around the innovative connections between buyers and sellers that are characteristic of the new models of exchange. Pepsi Refresh project connected the brand with the community. New Balance teamed up with the long-distance runner (and a certified weirdo) Anton Krupicka, Uniqlo created Lucky Counter which combines group dynamics with people's desire for discounts, Lufthansa came up with utility, Burberry connected their brand to everyone with a trench, etc etc.

Slide 10: Often, we think that the client brief is about advertising or promotion, while we should be thinking about the brand or about the new ways to reach audience in digital space. What is brand's real problem? How to connect with audience in the digital space in order to solve it?

Slide 11: And now, onto practical stuff. First, start from the consumer. Here, we see a traditional advertising model of brand/product/category and consumer. Traditional (or brand) planners start every assignment from a competitive landscape, from thinking about the brand (what does it stand for? what's at its core?), the product (what are its benefits? what are the barriers to adoption?). Then they often look into surveys and numbers about the audience, and conduct focus groups to confirm their thesis. It's the thesis-support thesis model, as Noah reminded me the other day. And this is not wrong. Where digital strategists start from, in contrast, is a consumer. They are putting it at the center, as a starting point for framing a hypothesis, then they then test against brand, product and category insights. The benefit is seeing something that we have previously missed - instead of getting answers on our questions, we are letting consumers tell us what they want.  We are seeing the world through their eyes. And in order to do that, we have to reach a true understanding of their habits, culture, social context and their motivations space.

Slide 12: How do we reach that understanding? Well, we inquire: how do we think about the category? how do they talk about the brand? how do they perceive the product? Observing, monitoring and listening to customers can often reveal a different set of needs that escape the traditional quantitative methods. Here, social listening tools become very useful - they offer insights into the barriers to category and barriers to wider adoption of the brand. They offer insights into the context of consumers' life and role of priducts and a brand within it - they help us define the problem and come up with possible solutions. Through considering how to reach out to these people, it becomes possible to come up with the ideal brand experience that is conveyed across diverse touchpoints. Visualizing and codifying human motivation gives us opportunity to beter understand and direct human behavior. Deep seated or hidden needs and cultural trends can all be identified from dialogue with customers. It uses personas as a vehicle for introducing a user perspective and adds input from a wide selection of user-centered methods.

Slide 13: And how do we go about that? People leave digital traces everywhere: they talk, share, connect comment, track and update everything (or almost everything they do), but the difference is that now we can see all of that. It's all laid out for us to explore. 

Slide 14: For example, personas are one useful way of mapping and visualizing our learnings - they are a great communication device to visualize who our audience is, and to clearly communicate it to creatives, experience designers, content strategists, and technologists. They bring everyne on the same page in regards to the audience we are talking to. Moreover, they help us clarify the goals and tasks of our different target groups. Best yet, tey lay out the touchpoints for a sound media strategy, content strategy, paid media buy - because we know where we can find these people.

Slide 15: Now that we get acquainted with out target, we can start making our digital brief. No matter what format our digital brief uses, it has to revolve around the following: a) the idea (this is our response/problem formulation for the client's challenge), b) the tasks (how are we going to go about solving this problem?), c) connections plan (tactics and system access points), and d) success metrics. Digital is not everything, but it somehow gets into almost everything - it's got to be part of our objectives, our brand, our audience. The main and defining characteristics of digital briefs is not what we are going to communicate. Instead, we are thinking what kind of system we are going to build, and how we are going to draw people into it. Another thing to remember is that digital brief is means to an end, rather than an end in itself - which is always the case when you are dealing with the traditional agency process. Planners take too much time to write the brief, then they hand it over to creatives, who are at that point pissed off because they aren't left with enough time to come up with an idea, etc.

Slide 16: Adopt a systems approach, with a brand behavior at its center. Brand story defines the brand experience and helps us decide how to convey it through different touchpoints. This is not an integrated campaign (while it may look like one), and there are two reasons for it. First, I have never seen a successful advertising campaign. Second, at the system's core is a brand behavior, rather than a message. We are not simply pushing out a message through all different touchpoints in the "matching luggage" (thanks Farrah) way - instead, we are carefully considering how each touchpoint conveys a part of the story, and how all of them combined convey consistently and seamlessly brand behavior. Each touchpoint is the starting point for the experience and not the end point for the messaging. Brand behavior informs also how touchpoints should be designed, and which touchpoints we should choose to focus on. It defines the tone of voice, look and feel, and content, and interactions for each.

Slide 17 and 18: Our next task is to visualize the brand experience flow - for example, here we are visualizing customer journey for product trail. It helps us define the importance of each media touchpoint. We are deconstructint the marketing process into discrete touchpoints and interactions. Each touchpoint creates a "brand movement." A typical consumer journey is multi-channel and time-based. The second example is for the challenge of brand affinity. Again, we have brand moments that are experienced according to the context of each touchpoint.

Slide 19: Finally, and we are going to cover this in the separate session of this workshop, our task as digital strategists is to make each point work for us. This means assigning monetary value, expectations and success benchmarks to each touchpoint. This is going to help us dynamically optimize the campaign as we go, and foreground the importance of the most effective touchpoints, all the while minimizing the exposure of the less successful ones. In other words, we are assigning metrics of success to each touchpoint, so we can monitor and optimize them as the campaign unfolds. 

Slide 20: And now, it's important to understand that these four things: starting from the consumer, writing a digital brief, visualizing the brand experience flow, and assigning metrics of success to each touchpoint are not theoretical exercises. The reality is messy, but it helps to have a few useful tools and useful guidelines. It’s the experience, the process of trial and error, and figuring things out as you go. 

View more presentations from Ana Andjelic.

 

 

Everything about digital strategy ...

I am co-teaching the first-ever, all-day digital strategy course on November 18 in New York City. Along with the two amazing ladies (and the super-accomplished professionals), I am going to cover everything that ranges from how to write a digital brief, what are success stories and why there were successful, how collaboration between digital strategists and creatives should look like, to how to sell digital strategy to clients. More information about the full day agenda is here: http://digitalstrategycourse.eventbrite.com/

You should come, it's going to be fun! And bring friends :)

is stale economic logic behind digital marketing hampering its success?

This article got me thinking. The shortcomings of the neoclassical economic theory have been known for a long time now. It's also well known that many new currents emerged as a response to this failure. What's less explored - if at all - is what this means for marketing and advertising (and by this, I don't mean academic exploration, but the adoption of the new economic learnings in practice). Here and there, we use segments of behavioral economics, economic psychology, and economic sociology but overall seem to ignore the very reality that deemed traditional economic theory obsolete. Think monetization opportunities in redistribution markets and/or business models that can emerge from collaborative consumption. Our marketing frame is still not the one of a dynamic economic world. In all our rush for the re-invention of marketing, we seemed to have forgotten to change the economic logic behind it.

The image above is from Trashr, which connects supply and demand of discarded goods. Everyone who's lived in NYC for a while knows what gems can be found discarded on the street. Why not create a market around it? One man's trash is another man's treasure, after all. 

A social media strategist?

There are a lot of social media strategists around. I know and like quite a few of them. The trouble is, this role can be viewed as a canvas for the ad industry's struggle to capture and define its own evolution.

The main problem with all roles revolving around social media is the limited (and limiting) career path. Just imagine: one can be a community manager; then a senior community manager, than a director of community management, and then ... what? Narrow specialization prevents this person from both assuming a higher managerial role (as he/she doesn't have the necessary breadth of expertise in leading multi-disciplinary teams) and from playing a more important client-facing role (since he/she can't help client with a broader brand and business strategy). 

It's inherent in the role that people assuming it will inevitably, sooner or later, move onto something else. But how? Being pidgeon-holed by their tactical tool belt, social media strategists despite their title, rarely get to actually do very little strategy. In the unfortunate agency process, they come in once insights have already been formed and ideas have already took shape. But it's not only the process to blame: the social media people, themselves, are hardly able to bring to table brand and consumer insights in a way that planners do.

So what's to do? It would be wrong to say that any specialization is undesirable. It's only tactical, and not strategic specialization that sucks (think Flash designers).

Advertising strategists have the most diverse backgrounds, interests, skills and knowledge and these - if formulated as a specific strength within a wider context of understanding digital behaviors - can prove to be invaluable areas of specialization. But specializations we talk about are those like digital branding, e-commerce, gaming, digital communication, or behavioral economics. These are vast, dynamic areas, and they don't suffer from the danger of becoming obsolete when some new tool or tactic or behavior shows up.

And right there - in posing the problem as a challenge of understanding digital behaviors - is the possible way out. Viewed in this context, social media become the question of interactions, interpersonal and group dynamics, influence and movements. The catch is to redefine the specialization not in terms of social media, but in terms of social behaviors.

Because, social media strategy that starts from behaviors is never going to become obsolete. We only have to ask how social media makes our consumers' behaviors more informed, more fun, or better. Will placing customer service on Twitter achieve our brand's goal? Will activating community achieve it? Or, should we use social media for advertising? The answers - and the tactics selected - all depend on what behavior we want to modify. 

The way for social media strategists of today to survive is to start thinking less about the toolset they have on their disposal, and more about the social dynamics they are trying to create or influence. My bet is that it will become easier for them to operate on the strategic level, to envision the path to brand and business objectives, and to advance their career path further.

Honesty in Advertising

This one is interesting. Out of sheer fun, during a dinner at this past SxSW, a few of us thought that would be fun to create a panel with a sole purpose of talking about something no one talks about because it is off-boundaries. Well, thanks to Matt Van Hoven, a persistent guy, this became a reality and we are submitting a panel proposal that does exactly this. 

An honest disclaimer: I never thought that it would become a serious thing until I saw Matt's email this morning ... copied here below:

from Mathew Van [email protected] to Brian Morrissey <[email protected]>, Alessandra Lariu <[email protected]>, James Cooper <[email protected]>, Ana Andjelic <[email protected]>, Liron Reznik <[email protected]> date Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 9:27 AM subject SXSW Voting Ends Friday - PLS RT Important mainly because of the people in the conversation.

Brian, Ale, James, Ana, Liron, 

Friday marks the last day to get votes for our panel "Is There an Honest Day's Work in Advertising?"

We'll explore the ethical decisions we make in our efforts to get projects, produce them etc – and the perceived effects our work has on the audiences we target. 

This is sure to attract a lot of people in the business, and outside it and you will all have the chance to come out as thoughtful, aware, socially-conscious members of the industry. But we need to band together to get the word out about this topic/panel.

Ale – your latest work with SheSays and the creation of SHOUT indicates you see a disparity and are working to change it. Baller. 

Ana/Liron – your approaches to strategy are unique, if not symbiotic – focusing on the product, forcing the marketing strategy to extend from it, and seeking to convert the public into media channels for products they appreciate - a shift in honesty – in that you believe in seeking the right people rather than casting a net. Badass.

James – building out TechStars, an incubator for tech, represents a shift in advertising thinking and you're leading it. Our industry is known for stealing and co-opting great ideas. You're working to build actual products by incubating these start-ups. Sheeeeeiiiiiiiiiiiiiit.

Brian – Your move to DigiDay represents, to me, your desire to find new ways of understanding the business. I tip my hat to you. 

Let's show the industry that honesty and advertising can co-exist. You all have immense influence in the social sphere. Please take a minute and share this link: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/11254?return=%2Fideas%2Findex%2F10%2Fcategory%3AJournalism++%2Fpage%3A2

Let's flip this thing on its head, yeah?

Have a great weekend -

M

What got me is how nicely Matt summarized panelists diverse roles and strengths. Which, in return, got me thinking whether there's really something in the topic of honesty as addressed by this particular group of people.

 

Post-Resume World

This is the presentation I was carrying around on iPad to my job interviews in June, instead of my resume. I realized that, more than a list of places, clients, and projects that I have done in the past, nothing inspires a conversation like talking about the way I think about things, what I find interesting/important, and what I am passionate about.

Having a social object at the meeting makes the assessment of the work fit easier because two parties are involved in an equal-footing exchange (instead of one-sided conversation style that's a staple of interviews). It also allows a person to tell a story in a personal way that puts work & extracurricular accomplishments in the real-life, relevant context of someone's life (always more interesting than just listing stuff that someone has done). It shows, too, a person's presentation skills and ability to build an argument (which is potentially super-useful for client presentations & meetings). Finally, it's a tangible display of someone's simple know-how of how to put a beautiful-looking deck together. 

And it worked out for me, in the best possible way. 

p.s. For the obvious reasons, I took out the  four case studies that are part of the original deck; they served as examples of my past work & my thinking approach to specific client tasks + deliverables. But everything else is there!

p.p.s. The part of "data mining" is taken from Julian Cole and the part of it is mine. 

 

SxSW Panel Proposal: Creativity for the Complex World

Bud and I would love to talk about complexity at the next SxSW, so we started thinking, plotting, and writing, and this is what we came up with... It's basically a summary of everything that he and I have been obsessed about in the past months, and is an attempt to get more people to start thinking about complexity. Hope the panel happens!

In a nutshell:

Have you ever been to a kid’s birthday party? It’s chaotic, unpredictable, fast-moving, and fun. It’s either the best thing or the worst thing, but you can’t know in advance which of the two is going to be.

Today’s digital world is a little bit like kids’ parties. It just involves a lot more people. And anything that has to do with a lot of people doing a lot of things is complex. To create something in the complex space forces us to think differently about the approach to, processes, and products of creativity.

This new creativity starts with interconnections between data, people, and things. It deals with the web of a bunch of small moving pieces that create intricate feedback mechanisms and new behaviors. It mixes code with the story and it’s open and iterative. It’s methodology relies on complexity’s own tools for solving problems. It's not about coming up with the new creative formats, but in making new connections. It’s a medium, not the product.

Complexity can be scary when connected with creativity. But it’s also unbelievably inspiring. It offers the maximum creative flexibility and the maximum executional options. It makes us realize that simplicity is a false god and that the new rule of creativity is looking for intuitive solutions that don’t reduce complexity but that thrive in it.

This panel is going to answer the following questions:

1. What's the difference between a simple and a complex problem?
2. Why does that difference matter when making digital things?
3. What does a creative process look like that respects complexity?
4. How do you build, launch, manage, and learn from many small experiments rather than one big product/campaign/message?
5. How should complex relationships shape creative strategy and execution?

You can see the revised & submitted proposal here.

 

digital world provides solutions for its own complexity*

*Or, why the holistic approach works better in digital.  

It doesn't reduce the complex situation to a causal, simple explanation. Instead, it's looking for intuitive solutions that seamlessly fit into people's behaviors. All well-designed products, services, and games are intuitive. Again, they are not simple - they intuitive.

The popular belief is that the contrast to complexity is simplicity. It's not. It's making things intuitive.

It helps that holistic approach inspires thinking through associations, both in their literal and metaphorical meaning. Literally, associations-as-in-connections are everywhere and exist between everything (people, information, tools, ideas). Metaphorically, associative thinking inspires us to make unexpected connections between things; and to recognize the innovative opportunities in the process.

Since it forces us to look beyond the obvious, holistic approach encourages "what if," rather than "why" and "how." It's non-linear and allows for the unexpected - both of which are in stark opposition to reductionist agency thinking a.k.a. "find the best strategy for solving a problem, discover one key dimension of consumers' behavior, define one thing that this advertising message is about." Instead, it's pushing for imagination and creativity: both in concepting and in execution.

Embracing the complexity of the whole situation is in fact a necessity in digital space. What we are dealing with are unexpected, ever-evolving movements and unpredictable connections. They generate micro-tensions and antagonisms that are ripe with cultural potential that has a direct consequence for brands. We are grappling with a networked social influence, and detecting "accidental influentials" in a given situation is as critical for campaigns as it is unpredictable. Irrationality of human behavior doesn't help matters, either: people's sensitivity to the design of information environments and activities of others is a powerful engine for behavioral change and needs to be utilized more in digital marketing campaigns. Then, there is data about individual and collective patterns of activities, and their aggregates act as a shared communication object with powerful storytelling potential. These sorts of stories disrupt the traditional model of authorship over advertising narratives. And finally, collaborative consumption and redistribution markets are constantly showing us where consumers' behaviors and needs are going: they represent a compelling lab for finding new sources of value that brands can deliver outside of their usual production/consumption value chains.. 

There are all challenges that resist obvious solutions and cannot be reduced to a single-cause explanation. So what to do? If complexity of the environment prevents one way of responding to the client task and if it prevents predicting the success of a single creative solution, then the best is to put all this complexity right at the center of the strategic problem-solving process.

This is hard. The need for strategy comes from our, human, anxiety in the face of uncertainty. Strategies are "anticipation machines" designed to help us know what the future will be before it happens. Complexity prevents this - but at the same time the problem is not unsolvable. If we can't have foresight, we can have hindsight. And a lot of those. The hindsight comes from standing close to the edge, which in plain language means merging strategy with its execution.

The good news here is that yes, while complexity creates a lot of challenges, it at the same time gives us tools to solve them. All one needs to be is crafty. (Big ups to the most brilliant Julian Cole for sharing some of his ideas about all of this).

In practical terms, this means that methodology for dealing with complexity needs to revolve around complexity's own tools. And, believe it or not, these tools are everywhere. Forget about eMarketer, and Forrester, Sysomos, and all that stuff. They won't solve the problem of originality of your campaign or of a real behavioral challenge that you want to create with your target audience.

What will solve the problem is a little game called digging for clues. I often use Wordle to run customers' reviews of the product/service/brand through it. It lets me uncover the common themes and the possible sources of tension or cognitive dissonance that are useful as insights for a campaign. GoodReads and apps like WANT! uncover what people identify with, how they define themselves, what is important to them, and what captures their collective imagination - all of which provides context in which a campaign is going to be received and what can make it resonate well with its target. Sites like 43Goals on 43Things and Daytum give us insights in human motivation, in different roles people are playing, what are their strivings, how they make choices and what are their frustrations. This helps come up with the ideas for inspiring and facilitating behavioral change for our target. 

Our understanding of the wider context of our audience's lives allows us to recognize cultural micro-tension, sources of influence, data that we can use for marketing, or needs that allow us to create an exchange market around. 

It lets us capture the new territories for our brands and to come up with the "what if." A new way of looking at things, perhaps, but that's exactly the point.